Stories

Humans love a great story, some might say that storytelling is woven into our DNA. Many cultures define someone by their story, and Scott is no different. Here is a collection of colorful events from his past:

In 1998 Lotus wanted Scott and the team he led at IBM fired, then arrested for hacking a Lotus product and mapping Notes dot net slash support to a dummy page on an external IBM test server. His team had managed to expose a flaw in a key Lotus product that Scott’s division at IBM had relied on.

In 1993 Scott was paying $45/CDR for blanks in quantities of 100. These days everyone has burned a CD, but back in 1993, it was serious voodoo. Scott and a coworker developed the first ever process for installing a computer operating system from CD, OS2. It earned Scott and his team a divisional award, and a place on the cover of PCWeek above the fold when that periodical defined IT.

Late in 1983 while at RIT Scott hacked the online testing system used by professors. Technically it was a trivial exploit, but at the time it was very exciting, and he really did earn that ‘A’ in Fortran.

Two years after the Lotus incident above, live during a SuperBowl party Scott hacked a website for a dot-com that had just advertised during the game. While their commercial was running Scott made a trivial change to their website. For the change to have taken effect it would have required a server reboot, regardless Scott rolled it back before the game returned from commercials.

Have you ever had your domain “Black Holed”? Scott has, but it took nearly 4,000 attempts at getting a job to earn total Internet banishment. How many people do you know can actually substantiate their claim for being banned from the Internet!

Who spends $750 on a computer with 4K of RAM? Scott did back in March of 1983, and this is the story of how he took winnings from a SuperBowl pool and turned them into a career.

How do you burn $16M in one year while building an infrastructure to support 16 million visitors an hour? Well in 2000 you have a crafty sales rep from IBM sell you $4.5M in hardware, hire another 70 people, for a total of 130, then never earn $1 of actual revenue, and watch the dot-com bubble burst around you. Scott was that sales rep, employee #56, and he left IBM for this lesson.

Scott has other technology adventures, but you’ll have to wait for the book…